In L.A., Blurring the Line Between Art and Housewares

Slide Show | In L.A., Blurring the Line Between Art and Housewares An emerging crew of young Los Angeles sculptors are branching out into functional pieces for the home.

Ji Shin

January 29, 2014

By Design

By SU WU

It’s no surprise that many sculptors have a yen for making furniture. After all, the tools are right within reach, and the process isn’t that different. In Los Angeles, which has a long history of furniture manufacturing and an abundance of interior spaces to fill, a growing number of young artists are making forays into the realm of domestic utility. “There’s a lot of sculpture out there that doesn’t want to admit to being furniture,” says the local artist Michael Rey, who has of late branched into objects that retain his affinity for the visual language of cartoons and ’90s pop culture.

In just the last year or so, L.A. has seen group exhibitions of artist-made planters and at least two shows of artist-made lighting. This month, the sculptor Matt Paweski launched a line of multifunctional lamps with his partner, Gillian Garcia, under the name Studio Spruzzi. “I know how to make stuff look a certain way, and I’m pretty good at making it do what it needs to do; I’ve spent years building and problem solving,” Paweski says. “At the end of the day, it’s what you want to live with.” In a classic example of constraints driving inspiration, Studio Spruzzi grew out of the couple needing pieces that would fit into the built-in nooks of their 140-square-foot Mount Washington home, a former massage studio.

The sculptor Nate Page, whose site-specific works disrupt notions of architecture and public space, has made tables and lamps out of his own disassembled installations. Rey has made the dialogue between furniture-making and sculpture explicit. For an upcoming show in Brussels, the artist — whose first job out of art school was in furniture restoration — created a pair of powder-coated steel chairs on which visitors can sit and look at his wall-bound artworks. Ry Rocklen, another 30-something L.A.-based sculptor, went from nickel-plating and tiling household objects like mattresses and pillows to making full bar and living-room sets for last month’s Art Basel in Miami Beach.

“In contemporary art, there’s a freedom to think about problems of design in completely different ways, and sometimes not even as problems,” says Ryan Conder, the owner of the Mid-City design and men’s wear boutique South Willard, which has provided a platform for functional work by Paweski and other L.A.-based sculptors, including Jason Meadows and Torbjörn Vejvi. The trend, it seems, isn’t just about category-busting, but about artists extending their sensibilities into the rest of life. “I don’t know much about design,” says Paweski, “but my references are people who are deep in their quest for what their vision is.”